Street legal

Congratulations to the new mothers and infants of Washington State. As of today, the right to breast feed, even where someone might see you doing something we have have been doing for a few million years now, is recognized as a “civil right.”

One would think it more properly a mammal right.

Kim Rechner, a 42-year-old mother of two, said she was breast-feeding while waiting for her car at a tire store when she was told by an employee that she needed to do it in the bathroom, an experience she said was humiliating.

If your child were on the bottle, or at the knife and fork stage, would you welcome the edict that she had to eat in a public toilet?

What kind of depraved society has to resort to court battles and official codification to affirm that the most basic of necessary acts is, in fact, a legal right? Do we have to legislate the right to scratch our noses or blink our eyes because these acts might arouse some fetishist or other?

Is it so goddamned difficult, even if you are emotionally twelve years old, to avert your eyes? There is some sort of basic problem here that I can’t quite formulate, but it involves the notion that privacy is not just a personal right of one person’s, it is something that is obligatory for us to grant one another. Not just the right to privacy but the duty and responsibility to honor it.

All you have to do now, moms, is provide proof of a good faith effort to restrict your consumption of mercury laden tuna and bass – we’re not too sure yet about the squid and mackerel – and we should be able to plead you out on the assault charges too.